SPH Simulation of Structures Impacted by Tailing Debris Flow and Its Application to the Buffering Effect Analysis of Debris Checking Dams

Abstract

Since the tailing dam fails catastrophically with substantial instantaneous deformation, it is difficult to measure the migration of debris flow caused by the failure of the tailings dam. A simulation model of tailing debris flow based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) theory of elastic-plastic constitutive equation has been established by considering the viscoplasticity of mud and the elastic-plastic characteristics of tailing sand to investigate the impact effect of tailing flow on the downstream structures. By comparing the experimental and two different simulation results obtained, it can be concluded that SPH elastic-plastic constitutive model can effectively simulate the accumulation and migration processes of the tailing debris flow, which indicates that the SPH model has good applicability to solve geotechnical large deformation problems of similar tailings flow slide. Then, the verified simulation model developed based on a series of simulations of tailing debris flow propagations was used to determine the momentum reduction on the downstream structure resulting from the presence of a simple checking dam perpendicular to the direction of propagation and to determine the characteristics of stresses applied to this structure in terms of peak impact force and evolution over time to the main flow direction.